With my father having passed away a little over a month ago (and his mother having willfully chosen to undergo shock treatments prior to and during my lifetime), I read with intense absorption.
On the one hand, as a kid from suburban Chicago, the thought of living a celebrity lifestyle gave off this, I don't know, charmed-life-the-grass-is-always-greener-on-the-wealthy-side-of-the-fence image even though as an adult, I have been able to observe how celebrity and fame, ala someone like Britney Spears, can be a huge price to pay in exchange for one's privacy. What Ms. Fisher manages to do, however, is tell the truth letting people in to her heart in such a way as to let them find a piece of themselves.
Such a thing occurred for me.
Having celebrities for parents or parents who are celebrities, she came to realize how surreal her life was as a child. Her parents weren't just someone else at work or while out to dinner with friends, they were someone to a whole lot of someone's. Their lives, fact or fiction, were played-out in a very, public way.
What struck me...what I connected to was the notion, reality really, of how our parents (my father, mostly, for me) are other people when they're not our parents. They have careers, work friends, friend friends, hobbies, interests, secrets and a whole, entire life we really know nothing about. On a daily basis, they're making connections and having relationships with many a sundry of folk, leaving us in the dark, because we see them as "our parents" not as human beings with full and complete lives...or not.
It was at my father's wake and funeral I met-upon his reality, and my surrealism.
A celebrity. Who knew my father was a celebrity? He died in Bensenville, IL Monday morning November 10th; by 1 o'clock, I was on a plane from California arriving that evening. After having a smart martini...or two, my sister, Lori, a wise woman, asked me if I would speak at his funeral. I, of course, agreed as well as agreed to behave but not before asking, "Define behave?".
Over the next two days, I attempted to formulate, in my mind, some sort of uplifting, positive eulogy in celebration of his life, but it just wasn't there.
It's not that my father was a horrible man, husband or father, because he wasn't. What he was was human. And, I surmise, as humans, we're not able to be all things to all people all at the same time...if ever.
As I grew up in the 60's and 70's, in a house built on what was previously farmland, in the booming Chicago suburb of Addsion, my father did what society expected of him. At times, he worked two jobs to support his family including driving the bus for the Lutheran school my sisters' and I attended. His efforts allowed my mother to be a "housewife" until she returned to work upon my arrival at the 5th grade. Somewhere in there, during the early part of the 60's, he also found time to be chief of the local, volunteer, rural, fire department.
The three-bedroom, one-bath home we lived in was purchased a year after my birth in 1959. And while it was similiar to those in the neighborhood, having been built by a different developer/builder, it was slightly, not unlike myself, different than the others. With one bathroom and tub for the five of us and no shower, my father created one in the basement, laundry room utilizing a garden hose.
In them, there days, laundry rooms had what was known as a "stationary tub". The garden hose was attached to the tub's faucet; then somehow bracketed to the rafters with a shower head screwed-on to the other end and then there I was, in all my glory, showering in the middle of the laundry room, while standing directly over the floor drain.
At some point, a second refrigerator along with an extra oven for the house, were added to the laundry room leaving me to realize, later on in life, how convenient it would be, as a hurried-host, to have the ability to prepare dinner for my guests while showering at the same time...alas, killing two birds with one stone.
Given my father's talent for makeshift, shower installation, he was a handy guy. At his wake, Joe, our next door neighbor after the original owners, the Touhy's moved-out, came up to me and told me how my father had been such a great mentor to him, because here he was a young man of twenty, owning his first home, and my father took the time to teach him how to repair things himself as well as helped him install a new water heater. This, I'm sure, is a true story.
Another true wake story. Harold, the son of my father's boss of many years, came up to me and told with me what a great mentor my father had been to him because upon his return from Viet Nam, my father was the one who'd taught him everything he needed to know about running the family business that, by the way, became MULTI...LOCATION...AL!
To these men, in younger times, myself included, my father was famous.
To me, 'round about age 36, is when he became infamous.
1 comment:
Hi, Larry!
Great writing!
J
Post a Comment